Tuesday, 5 July 2011

Weird, dark days for women's rights and not just in the Excited States, though they do take the (fruit) cake.

In the UK, they have an adoption czar, who wants women to, guess what? Give up unwanted children for adoption.

Women who are pregnant with unwanted babies should be advised to have the child and give it away for adoption, the Government’s new adoption czar said today.

They should be offered adoption as a routine ‘third option’ alongside abortion or struggling to raise the baby themselves, he said.

What are the qualifications for adoption czar, you ask?

Mr Narey, a former Prison Service chief who became an advocate of adoption while running the children’s charity, said social workers should no longer press pregnant women with personal difficulties that they should bring up their child.

This, a day after scandalous abortion stats were released showing that some women aborted fetuses that would have become 'special needs' children. So, I guess those women should have carried to term and loving couples would be lined up around the block to adopt.

Yeah. Right.

Now, Poland, poor benighted Poland, where fetus fetishists are also on a roll and want to outlaw abortion altogether.

The draft had been submitted to parliament by anti-abortion activists, drawing support from about 450,000 petitioners from the conservative opposition as well as a rightist, liberal party in the ruling coalition.

Abortion is outlawed in Poland except in cases when pregnancy results from rape or incest, poses a health risk to the mother or if the foetus is severely deformed.

But even under such conditions, hospitals are known to refuse abortions.

Illegal abortions can be punished by up to two years in prison for those who perform them, while the women themselves are not liable.

Polish women's rights group say there are up to 180,000 illegal abortions in Poland each year, while official data indicates just hundreds of legal terminations annually.

We've followed stories from Poland before: like this one of a raped 14-year-old girl caught between the forced birth gang and more humane forces. She was separated from her mother and bullied by a priest into refusing an abortion. Sense prevailed.

This story didn't have a good outcome. A severely myopic woman feared for her eyesight if she continued her third pregnancy. She consulted a bunch of doctors who agreed that her sight was endangered but who wouldn't sign the permission for an abortion. Right to (fetal) life trumps right to see.

5 comments:

Fern Hill . . . there's some encouraging news about some of the consequences of the Zapatero government's changes to policies affecting reproductive rights; no hell broke loose! At the end of the linked article there's mention of an imminent decision(?) or statement(?) from the Spanish High Court - - what's to decide? Did I miss something? What's being contested?